Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (47 page)

There were rules; everything was controlled. It wasn’t only the chador and headdress for women; or boys and girls not walking together; or women not singing on the radio and television; or certain kinds of music not being played. There was a complete censorship, of magazines, newspapers, books, television. And helicopters flew over North Tehran looking for satellite dishes; just as the Guards walked in the park to watch the boys and girls; or
entered houses to look for alcohol and opium; or, as I was to see in far-off Shiraz, the local morals police did the rounds even of the tourist hotels to make their presence felt.

In 1979 and 1980 the missionaries of the Islamic revival, echoing one another, as though their copy had been provided by a central source, had endlessly said that Islam was a complete way of life; and in Iran now it was possible to see political Islam as a complete form of control. Mr. Parvez, the founder-editor of the
Tehran Times,
had said to me not long after I had arrived, “They want to control your way of sitting here, and your way of talking.” I don’t think I had understood what he was saying. It took time to understand how far the restrictions reached, though it was easy enough to state what they were; and it took time to understand how they were deforming people’s lives.

Mehrdad’s sister was unmarried, and had little chance of getting married, since too many men of suitable age had been killed in the eight-year war. She simply stayed at home when she came home from work: silent, full of inward rage, her unhappiness a shadow over the house and a source of worry for her parents, who couldn’t work out a future for her. It was too difficult for her to go out; and now she had lost the will. In this she was like the fifteen-year-old daughter of a teacher I had got to know. This girl had already learned that she could be stopped by the Guards and questioned if she was alone on the street. She hated the humiliation, and now she didn’t like to go out. The world had narrowed for her just when it should have opened out.

In February 1980 I had seen young women in guerrilla garb among the students camped outside the seized U.S. embassy: Che Guevara gear, the theater of revolution. I remembered one plump young woman, in her khakis, coming out of a low tent on this freezing afternoon with a mug of steaming tea for one of the men: her face bright with the idea of serving the revolution and the warriors of the revolution. Most of those young people, “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini,” would now have been dead or neutered, like all the other communist or left-wing groups. I don’t think that young woman with the mug could have dreamed that the revolution to which she was contributing—posters on the embassy wall and on trees were comparing the Iranian revolution with the Nicaraguan, making both appear part of a universal movement forward—would have ended in this way, with an old-fashioned tormenting of women, and with the helicopters in the sky looking for satellite dishes.

The very gear and style of revolution now had another meaning. The beards were not Che Guevara beards, but good Islamic beards, not cut by
razors; and the green guerrilla outfits were now the uniform of the enforcers of the religious law.

No one I met spoke of any kind of revolution as a possibility. That idea, so loved by Iranians of an earlier generation, had been spoilt now, as in the old USSR;
revolution
was a word that had been taken over by the religious state. No one ever spoke of the possibility of political action. There were no means, and no leaders in sight. No new ideas could be floated. The apparatus of control was complete. The actual rulers, though their photographs appeared everywhere, were far away; government here, as someone said, was “occult.” And still, in the general inanition, there was a feeling that something was about to happen. It made people nervous.

One afternoon, as we were driving up into the mountains above Tehran, Mehrdad, after seeming to say that people had learned how to live with the restrictions, abruptly said the opposite. He said, “Everybody is frightened. I am frightened. My father and mother are frightened.” (Poor father, again.) “They are not sure what the future will bring for them or for us, their children. They are not so worried for me. I am an adult now and can look after myself. But my brother is very young. The eight years or so he has to live before he becomes an adult are going to be very dangerous years.”

With this insecurity, certain fantasies had taken hold. The most extraordinary was that Khomeini had been a British or European agent. I had heard it first from Mr. Parvez, and had thought it part of his paranoia. But then I had heard it from many other people. There had been a meeting in the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, according to this story, and the Powers had decided to foist Khomeini on the Iranian people. The Iranians were simple people; they could be persuaded by skilled propaganda to demonstrate for anything; people had joined the demonstrations against the Shah not out of conviction, but simply to do what everybody else was doing. The establishing of an Islamic state in Iran was an anti-Islamic plot by the Powers, to teach Muslims a lesson, and especially to punish the people of Iran. And, as if answering those fantasies, there were even signs of the faith being questioned in certain aspects.

Mr. Parvez had said, “The war [against Iraq] was fought in the name of Islam. It was a blessing in disguise. Without the war people wouldn’t have got so fed up with Islam.” That had seemed extreme. But then I had detected wisps and shadows of religious uncertainty in some people’s conversation. Just as—in these fantasies issuing out of a people stretched to the limit by revolution, war, financial stringency, and the religious state—it was
said that Iranians were not really responsible for the Iranian revolution, so I heard that Iranians were not really responsible for the more dramatic aspects of the Shia faith. The bloody scourgings of Mohurram, the mourning month: the idea was really imported from Europe, from the Catholics; it had nothing to do with the original faith.

I talked about this to Mehrdad. He said, “It’s something habitual. Our enemies are always responsible. Blaming others, not ourselves.”

I had been given the name of Mrs. Seghir. She lived abroad now, part of the Iranian dispersion. She had returned to see her elderly parents, and had been in Tehran for some time. When I telephoned she invited me to lunch; and she and a woman friend came to the hotel to take me to the apartment. This was to conform to the rules: it wouldn’t have done for Mrs. Seghir or the friend to come alone to meet an unknown man.

The apartment was in an American-style block where things had decayed. The lift opened into a narrow little lobby that served two apartments. The lobby was more than shabby; it was dirty, with a nasty scrap of carpet. The gloom continued inside. In the sitting area of the open-plan room old Louis XVI reproduction chairs and a settee were like things not sat on. A wall, ridged with old lines of electric cord, was hung with a set of European miniatures of no value, flower pieces or landscapes, one to a frame, in two unsteady, widely spaced rows. A long dining table was at the other end of the room, next to the kitchen. The kitchen looked very much used.

In a small room beside the kitchen a man was sitting at a table just inside the open door. He was very old—but very old—with the pigment gone in irregular patches from his face. He sat at an angle to the table, with his back half to the door, and with the side of his face showing. This was Mrs. Seghir’s father; he was ninety-one. Mrs. Seghir’s mother, in the sitting area of the room, told me that; she herself was eighty.

Mrs. Seghir’s friend, who had come with her to the hotel, was now busy in the kitchen with Mrs. Seghir. The friend was divorced. She was friendly and fat, bursting out of her long skirt, and she had fat, greedy lips, made for food alone. She was delighted to help in the kitchen, and was fast on her high heels.

There was a French window from the sitting area to a balcony. It was half open, and the traffic noise was very loud. I looked out. One side of the balcony was a jumble of old cardboard and brooms and cleaning material,
and on the other side there was a covered easel or chest, or so it appeared. This was the satellite dish. Mrs. Seghir needed it for the news; she would be quite lost in Iran without the world news. The camouflage was to protect the dish from the helicopters; they were searching even now.

The food was laid out, in a smell of warm oil:
coo-coo,
which was a kind of Iranian quiche, rice, mashed eggplant. The old man—his face dreadfully damaged by age, his eyes very dark and shadowed below the pigmentless forehead and beside the blotched cheeks—came to the table, a belt around the trousers, some inches below the waistband and the belt loops. He was helped by his wife, Mrs. Seghir’s mother. She, very small and thin, her eyes weak behind her glasses, was still wifely and solicitous: such emotions go on to the end: it was affecting.

The fat lady talked about the north of England. A relation of hers lived there, a professional woman married to a professional man from Bangladesh. She had gone to visit the couple and had been taken with the good manners of the English. She spoke as though she really knew; yet I felt that what she was saying about England hadn’t come so much from her own experience as from the television she might have watched when she was over there.

The coo-coo was cut up for the old man by his wife. He helped himself to other things; but at the very end he lost control and, holding his head low over his plate, appeared to have an accident, to be a little sick. He got up after that—he had never spoken—and made his way back to his room. Carefully, he eased himself down into his chair, sitting again at an angle to the table, with his back to the open door. He had become very slow; the accident had wearied him; and now with painful deliberation—his world reduced to the performing of these small acts—he took out a pen, took up a folded newspaper, undid one fold, was content with that, held the paper down, and seemed ready to go on with the crossword puzzle.

I now noticed a Qom silk carpet on the floor, and a purple velvet cover on the coffee table with heavy, old embroidery, three lines of roses and vines done in silver thread mixed with gold: something done a long time ago for the extravagance, the luxury, the expense. Mrs. Seghir said that the embroidered velvet cover had been a gift to her from her mother. There were cut-glass dishes on the cover with sugared jelly balls and a saffron-colored candy made in Qom.

Later, when Mrs. Seghir was in the kitchen again, helping the fat lady with the dessert, the mother pointed to the chandelier and said, “Qajar arms.” I had seen the chandelier and, as it were, not seen it, finding it too
oppressive. Mrs. Seghir’s mother said again, “Qajar arms.” The Qajars, the dynasty overthrown in the 1920s by the father of the late Shah. I got up and looked at the engraving of the Qajar arms, quite hard to see, on the many glass chimneys of the chandelier. There was a circle of those chimneys, and they were like the chimneys of old-fashioned oil lamps; and within and below that circle were tinkling cut-glass pendants of varying size, intricately worked. Mrs. Seghir’s mother said, “Baccarat.” I saw for the first time that—in this small low room that needed paint and less clutter on the balcony and less noise from the traffic—there were two of these chandeliers. They filled the upper space. To be aware of the two was to feel choked.

Mrs. Seghir, her smock dancing over her chunky hips and her black hose, finished her kitchen work at last and came and sat with me. I asked about her husband. He had died from cancer, she said. I had touched a grief that was still raw. He had become frightened after the revolution, she said. He was an engineer, highly trained, with an important job with the government. He hadn’t lost his job, but the stress had destroyed him. Five years or so after the revolution he had complained one day of not feeling well, and they had gone to the doctor, as they would have done for some minor complaint. Cancer was diagnosed in the colon. It called for immediate surgery. The operation was done within days, and was successful. But then a later X ray showed that there was cancer in the lung as well.

On a little oval table, a reproduction piece, set not far from the half-open French window, were photographs of the family: Mrs. Seghir herself at different ages, her daughters, and, in a large frame, a photograph of her husband taken some time before his illness (he hadn’t wanted his children to see him when he became very ill). The photograph was of a handsome, good-natured man, immediately attractive and fine. The photographs, in varying frames, were close together on the little oval table, like the picture-holders among the elms and pines and oleanders and the fading flags in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. And they too, in a way, were martyrs of the revolution.